No medal but a silver lining

Schemers exposed in bid for fool's gold

Mike Lupica Column

At least we will never again have to hear about how Dollar-a-Year Dan Doctoroff, the deputy mayor of New York City who should start moving toward the door now, sat at the Meadowlands in 1994 and watched a World Cup soccer game between Italy and Bulgaria and began dreaming of bringing the Olympics to New York.

It was because of the passion he saw and heard all around him, Doctoroff always said, every bit a politician delivering a stump speech. If there could be this kind of passion for a sporting event involving two countries from across the world, what would it would be like in New York if we could bring together all the countries?

Doctoroff says he was moved by all that passion, anyway. More likely a guy who came to one of the biggest political jobs in New York City from the Bass brothers of Texas, huge Texas money guys who would love to own huge chunks of New York City, somehow saw dollar signs. Doctoroff was as moved as ever by them.

Because whatever happened with Dollar-a-Year Doctoroff that day in New Jersey, it touched off what was going to be one of the last great land grabs in this city. It wasn't just going to be the Olympic Stadium that would end up belonging to the Jets football team. It was all the prime real estate around it, and all the opportunities for the richest developers. Truly, Doctoroff has always been the deputy mayor of those developers, the way he was deputy mayor of the Bass brothers once.

This is how it works in big-city America, which means the America of the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. When they want to start carving up these big cities, they know they can use sports as a front.

Doctoroff tried to do it, gamely and over a long time, with the Jets and the Olympics. Bruce Ratner is doing it right now in Brooklyn with the Nets. Ratner is doing hardly anything different with his arena plan than Mayor Bloomberg and Doctoroff and the Jets were trying to do with the Hudson Railyards. He has just managed to fly under radar because the Jets and their West Side stadium became the main event.

But Ratner gets a sweetheart land deal, one of the sweetheart deals in the history of the city, and if you think it is about bringing pro basketball to Brooklyn then you are the kind of dream sucker Ratner needed to look like a hero. A hero of his own bank account. Take a look at his project and how it continues to grow. He just needed a sports team to make it work.

Ratner says he is doing it for Brooklyn. George Steinbrenner and his people say they the building of a new Yankee Stadium for the Bronx. Complete nonsense. They don't do it for the love of the city or the love of the game. They do it for the money. So do the Mets. Ratner isn't nearly as interested in tall basketball players as he is in the real tall buildings he wants to put all around them. Steinbrenner? He wants the luxury boxes he will get with his new stadium, and the break he is supposed to get from Major League Baseball on revenue sharing because he is building a new ballpark.

But they act as if we should build monuments for them. Doctoroff was the same way, telling us how he only took a dollar a year in salary and how he worked 100 hours a week on bringing the Olympics to New York.

By the way, Doctoroff was supposed to be in charge, as deputy mayor under Bloomberg, of rebuilding lower Manhattan. It never happened. Maybe that is why Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver, who stopped the West Side stadium with one punch, refused to even be in the same room with Doctoroff at the end, as Bloomberg was throwing everything at Silver trying to get him to vote in favor of the West Side stadium.

The loudest yahoos from NYC2012 will always tell you that New York would have won the bid for the 2012 Games if Bloomberg and Doctoroff had gotten their stadium. They don't know that and will never know that. All we know is that the Olympics go to London now, and if it hadn't been for Shelly Silver, the Jets would be getting their stadium and who knows how much public money it would have cost?

There are a lot of things we will never know about this Olympic process, starting right here: How much it really cost. It is all supposed to have been private money. Maybe it was, some of it coming from people who thought they could get a piece of the pie if New York won the bid. One number we hear is $35 million, but that is just from the last couple of years alone.

"This evening, New York's Olympic dream will become reality," Doctoroff said in Singapore the other day, when he was running around convincing people that he was still in the game.

Not New York's Olympic dream. His dream.

Give him his props. He almost pulled it off. He sold it to Bloomberg, a smart guy, and sold it to a lot of other smart guys until Shelly Silver wasn't buying. At that point Doctoroff was up against a tough guy from Lower Manhattan, somebody he thought he could swat like a fly, who wanted to know when the deputy mayor of New York would stop flying all over the world and do something down there.

Dollar-a-Year Doctoroff. In the end, the salary was about right.